Glass Maker: A Fairy Tale

Chapter Three

Perhaps it was fae magic as well, that she was able to sleep at all, but her sleep was not a peaceful one.

In the night, Katherine dreamed of glass and glowing figurines, green wings, and men in blue and golden threads stretching across time and over mountains. All wrapped around herself and her sister, pulling tight until she awoke sweating in bed in the early hours of the morning, long before she was set to awake and just before the sun was to rise.

Her heart raced and the still and stale air of her loft room felt drier than was normal for their usually rainy spring but tasted of dust and spices. In the half-darkness, her eyesight blurred at the edges, but she sat up anyway. The stars had long gone to sleep, and the pre-dawn light filtered in through her window which— she did a double take— was open.

It wasn't much, but it was enough that a slight gust of wind brought it in and out, as if the window and its hinges breathed with the night.

Stumbling from her bed, Katherine pulled back her blankets, surprised to feel that the room held none of the cold that would be expected of the time of year. She was halfway to the window when her bare feet brushed against a peculiar grittiness.

Looking down, she lifted her right foot inspecting it with squinted eyes. She expected to see garden soil or maybe wood grain. Instead, her fingers came away shimmering, lustered with golden dust. 

She tried in vain to wipe it off on her nightgown, but the gold winked at her where it stained her hands, catching the dawn light. She scratched at a spec with a fingernail but found it unmovable. Ink would've had less permanence.

Not for the first time, a rush of emotion overwhelmed her senses. Anxiety, frustration, and grief swirled in a noxious poison in her veins, and her breaths came heavily. She had to escape from this, whatever it was, but the world outside was still before daylight, and the town gates had yet to open.

Where would she go?

She had been nowhere in the span of her twenty years of life. She had ventured to a forest lake and to the cemetery to visit her sister, but the faraway shores of the rest of the world lay unknown to her. Cairn was all she'd ever known, even if tales of the seaside Ecrivenia, the desert-filled Aclus, and the cold but beautiful country of Marenta sometimes made it over the mountains and through the trees.

She did not place much stake in surviving deserts or freezing climates, but even Ecrivenia would be too far. She had no clue how to navigate deep woods or ford rivers, let alone what it would take to get past the guards that stood at the Cairn border.

Katherine felt suffocated as if through no fault of her own, her life's course had always been taken out of her hands. She was now realizing how very little agency she truly had. Even without the fae and the glass girl with her grass-green wings, her life never was her own. She would be here, either picking up after her father or trying to salvage their glass forge, until she died or married someone who she'd then have to do the same for.

She went to the window, her lungs begging for fresh air. The warped panes of the glass distorted the street below and the green space across from her home. Her breaths heaved, her hands shaking, but even now she noticed the trail of golden, glittering specs going from her window down to the street. She followed the path with her eyes until it disappeared into the bushes of the park, underneath a blossoming apple tree.

Would the trail dissipate? Or would every person who walked by her home on their way to the spring celebrations see the dust and see how it led straight to her?

If she wasn't going to be persecuted for magic before, she certainly might be now. She took a moment to steady her heart, trying not to get too ahead of herself. She didn't know if what the man— Samuel— said was even true.